note: I wrote this on April 6, and just noticed it never went out so I have hit send 8 days later :)
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Allo allo allo, here I am back: today in your inbox, but always in your heart.
It’s a grey, rainy morning, and I would like to ask Ms. Spring what we have to do around here to get just a little bit of sunshine? I would like it! I, along with 7 other optimists, tried to will the warm weather the other night by sitting outside for margarita happy hour all wrapped up in sweaters and jackets, and by the time I got home it took far too long to thaw out (and I usually run warm!) So sad, but I have been trying to remind myself to appreciate the fact that here in Philadelphia we have a proper Spring, there is a step between 30 and 80 degrees and that in and of itself is a gift! It is 50 degrees currently, and by 4pm it’ll hit 60, that’s a treat from the universe.
I’ve been taking it (my version of) slow these last couple of weeks. Last Sunday, Daniel and I moved into OUR house, and the experience has been so surreal that it’s been taking me many days (this is just the beginning) to process how fucking lucky we are to be in the position to purchase our own beautiful home, which is in pretty sick condition considering it’s 97 years old (the same age one of our neighbors will be turning later this month!) We don’t own any furniture, so we’ve been slowly and strategically figuring out how to make this a functional space, and when we get the time in between work and life’s other callings we’ve been able to pick up a couple of things here and there from facebook marketplace finds and Thunderbird Salvage (the kind of spot where you show up to the counter with your arms full of miscellaneous kitchen essentials like silverware, bakeware, and glasses, and they go “hmmmm, how about $10?” another blessing!)
I am someone who thrives in nesting, but also someone who thrives in my routines and rituals, so it’s been an interesting time. I’ve felt half present/half fuzzy as I attempt to carve out spaces to live into, and I’m just taking comfort in knowing that every day this place feels a little bit more like our space, and that the slow burn of shaping the home around our patterns is going to feel soooooo good. It’s been really rewarding to start meeting all of our neighbors one by one, to talk about the potential for our gardens with them, and to know that when we have some furniture this Summer, it will be really nice to invite them over and cook for them! We bought a home on a block mostly owned by older black couples and families who have been here for years, and we want to be really intentional about becoming a part of the community around us, not just hopping house to house to spend time with our other (mostly) white friends. I’m trying to make sure I can hold both the realities of what a young, white couple moving into this house means, and the everyday kindness and welcoming that has been extended to us by our new neighbors.
It means a lot to me that we intend to be here for the long term, and to be invested in this neighborhood that we love. Daniel and I are both people who want our neighborhood to be multi-generational, multi-racial, and to feel like a real community. At this point I could never live in a “neighborhood” that was only made up of transient, transplant, white millennials, and be happy there, that’s just not what I want my life to look like, I also cannot afford it even if I wanted to. So now the task becomes unlearning so much of what has been taught to young white people, especially who work in the cultural and creative fields, about what a “desirable” (aka flashy, bougie, noncommittal) life looks like, and deeply listening to what begets rootedness, what reinforces commitment, and what creates connection, both to the people around me and to the land I am living on (hello foraging! hello gardening!) This is probably my top priority, my project for the next decade of my life. It makes me really emotional to think about it. I say all of this, with high hopes, knowing that gentrification is basically hyperlocal imperialism, and trying to hold the difference between us buying this home and working to actively contribute to our community, versus the developers sinking their teeth into West Philadelphia, gutting homes, and turning them into rental properties. Obviously it isn’t black and white in that way, it’s not like we inherently, selflessly saved this home from an evil developer by buying it, etc., but the reality of gentrification is complex and multi-faceted, and while I try to hold myself accountable to the goals I have, I want to also extend a sort of grace to myself and not reduce everything down to “I am a bad person”, it’s cruel and unproductive.
On that topic, I recently emerged from an extended (unrelated? probably related, everything is related) period of fixating on whether or not I am a Bad person, so I would like to lay out some of what I learned, and what I’m holding as intentions after exiting that headspace, maybe these will be good reminders for you too:
Notice and redirect when I’m getting into All/Nothing/Always/Never territory in my thoughts and speech.
ex) “I will always do this terrible thing because I’ve always done it, and I’ll never be happy, and I’ll never make others happy because I will always derail my and others happiness” — this just simply isn’t true, it’s reductive, it’s catastrophizing, and it’s a sure sign I (and anyone else) am just torturing myself
Journal more, and make space for self-reflection that isn’t always out loud and with other people. Both are important, though! I can tell I’m not in a great headspace when I’m having a hard time hearing others without going into busy brain-translate this into what it means about me, and change the subject to be about me-mode. Not where we want to be!
Notice and redirect black and white thoughts about being a good or bad person! This is similar to all/nothing, and unhealthy in the same ways. I have a tendency to fixate on my behaviors and my own perceived transgressions and assign “Bad!” to them. Two weeks ago I convinced myself that my coping mechanisms are all harmful to others, that there is some divine scale that dictates that when I am taking care of myself it is directly, correlatively harming another person. While there are some coping mechanisms that I guess could be considered in this light, now that I have some clarity, I know that my coping mechanisms (sleeping in, taking longer to respond to texts/calls, isolating, disassociating) are far from divinely cruel. I am also trying to remember that people can and do cause harm all the time and aren’t Bad.
Rest!!! Give yourself a goddamn break! I want to shout out three of the writers that I follow for guidance who all reminded me in their own ways this week how important rest is:
Jessica Dore — who took this week off, and sent out a special short message about making time for yourself and your calm.
Marlee Grace — who wrote with such wisdom and humor about setting the bar as low as possible, and not just tricking yourself into thinking you set the bar low but secretly still judging yourself on that high high high unattainable bar, but just being proud of yourself for waking up and living through another day.
Annika Hansteen-Izora — who reminded me that creativity doesn’t dry up, and that consistent productivity is a capitalist hellscape. Looking at Spring as a reminder of what blossoms after a period of dormancy, and bringing in the question: “How will you be useless to capitalism today?” ALL blessings!
Now for the fun part! 😅 Let’s do some lists!
listening ~ listening ~ listening:
I went to see LCD Soundsystem twice last week and I’ve been listening to Sound of Silver too many times since, but it’s just such a perfect album, and now that I’m officially getting paid to work in a bookstore again (more blessings!) it makes for great music to hype myself up to take on a particularly arduous organizational task.
Sasami S/T & the Sasami-produced Fun House by Hand Habits — 2 standbys.
Akofa Akoussah S/T — this has been a groovy go-to for walks and cooking, and track 2, “Ramer Sans Rame”, goes immediately into the special pantheon of songs with really good “lalala”s that remind me of my cool friend Madel! To know them is to love them ♥
“Jackie Down the Line” by Fontaines D.C. is another one of those good lalalas
Recordings from the Åland Islands by Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer — I’m a huge fan of International Anthem, an experimental/contemporary jazz (and adjacent) record label out of Chicago, and this morning I got an email from them about this record so I started my day with it. What a good choice that was, highly recommend!
reading ~ reading ~ reading:
Not books, I’ll tell you that! I binge read 20 books in a row late Winter and then came up for air and went “okay, there are other things to tend to!” I bumped my goodreads challenge down to 1 book in an attempt to stop quantifying my reading, I still for posterity and for my own personal archive and reference want to use goodreads to track things, but I’m ready to break the cycle of anxiety for being “behind” on my reading schedule, fuck that! I just want to take my time and enjoy what I’m reading and encourage doing everything at my natural pace.
While moving I had to take a good look at all of the magazines I’ve let accumulate over the years, the well-meaning subscriptions to indie publications that I wanted to read and never did (especially because reading a magazine or a journal doesn’t count on goodreads, so I have to be reading books, books are the only thing that counts! no more!) I’m now excited to be in a place where I’m folding quarterlies and journals into my reading schedule. I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with this month’s Poetry Magazine, going into the back and starring the authors whose work particularly stands out so I can seek out more of their poems, it rocks.
Some of those poets I would like to shout out from the April 2022 issue are: Valzhyna Mort, Sawako Nakayasu, Mayowa Oyewale, Sasha Pimentel, Laura Theis, and Zêdan Xelef.
I am also reading the Spring 2022 issue of n+1, but I have to take that one article at a time, as that is spiral central. So far I’ve read about the ways in which cryptocurrency is just another market that the evil ghouls of the preexisting/traditional market are preying (again! spoilers!) on working class people around the world made even more vulnerable by the pandemic than before, and a solid exploration of classical versus contemporary orientalism and how each plays into different covid conspiracy theories focused on China. Food for thought, but I have to kill some brain cells with Canada’s Drag Race after, you know?
Finally, I am reading articles I’ve had open in tabs on my laptop since December. I have become the person who hoards tabs and I want to cut that shit out.
watching ~ watching ~ watching:
I have seen ONE movie recently, Lady Snowblood — the brilliant 1973 Japanese film from director Toshiya Fujita which famously “inspired” (aka he stole everything from this film) Tarantino to make Kill Bill, which is also an amazing film, don’t get me wrong. Basically Lady Snowblood fucking rocks and you should watch it, I had seen it once before but I forgot exactly how sick it is and also how radical the politics of the film are, so that was a great bonus. I’m looking forward to watching the sequel for the first time soon. I know that the brutal yet brutally cool female-led samurai slasher exploitation film was a thriving sub-genre of early 70s Japan and I look forward to learning more about it!
I watched all of RPDR UK vs The World (go figure), and now I’m watching season 1 of Canada’s Drag Race (go figure!)
it’s time for dessert (things that really brought me joy this week):
selling a lot of good books, it’s been busy in the store and that just makes me very happy
microdosing on mushrooms and then really really appreciating clouds for a few days afterwards. I understand why guys just painted massive, epic cloudscapes back in the day, I get it.
talking to strangers and making friends in dive bars
the 2 armchairs and 1 small table in my front room serving as the multi-purpose space for eating, working, and hanging out right now, they’re really pulling their weight!
the cat I am blessed to live with (squish) who has been obsessed with being all over me this week. She sleeps either directly behind my head or directly on top of my chest depending on what position she catches me in and that is just really special :’)
sea moss from the coolest guy at the farmer’s market, but also how excited Daniel gets when it’s time to eat our sea moss every day
on 4/4 it was the very special birthday of my tiniest friend Polly who turned 6! it was also the birthday of two of my most favorite guys Andrei Tarkovsky & Robby Müller, what a very very good day.
okay, that’s what I have for you today. I love you, please be patient with yourself, hold both, take some magnesium for your sore muscles, take a deep breath, try to break any outdated or unnecessary scarcity narratives you’re imposing on yourself, and know it’s okay to ask for what you need! ♥ ♥ ♥